I was pulling into the car park of a hotel in Portadown, Co Armagh, when I noticed a man slouched in the driver's seat of a parked car. I peered over and noticed the sinister features of the man known as King Rat.

I thought it would be best not to antagonise Wright, one of Northern Ireland's most brutal sectarian killers. So I approached him, introduced myself as the Times's Belfast correspondent and had a brief conversation.

My encounter with Wright took place on a warm summer's day shortly after the annual showdown between members of the Orange Order and nationalists at nearby Drumcree. He had threatened to spray the police with petrol from a tank which his supporters had driven into the grounds of the church at Drumcree in the back of a JCB digger.

Wright had delivered his message to Unionist leaders who were shaken by the experience. Their fears were understandable. As the leader of the Mid Ulster brigade of the Ulster Volunteer Force Wright had presided over a reign in terror in which many were murdered simply because they were Catholics.

With this in mind, I keep asking myself why members of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party have taken such a keen interest in Wright before and after he was murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army at the Maze Prison in December 1997.

The DUP's claim that it is wholly committed to peaceful means was stretched somewhat when one of its leading members shared a platform with Wright in September 1996.

The Rev Willie McCrea, then MP for Mid Ulster, said he was simply defending free speech after Wright was told by the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) that he would be shot unless he left Northern Ireland within 72 hours. The CLMC feared that his activities were risking a breach of its 1994 ceasefire.

The dogs in the street, as the old saying goes, knew that Wright was a multiple killer. When he was expelled from the UVF he established the Loyalist Volunteer Force. Its rallying cry was a take on Fred Flintstone:

Yabadadoo, any Taig [Catholic] will do.

Nationalist voters punished McCrea by unseating him at the 1997 general election. Moderate nationalists, who normally supported the SDLP, voted tactically for Sinn Fein, handing the seat to Martin McGuinness. The DUP pointed out that McGuinness was a self confessed member of the IRA.

McCrea, now MP for South Antrim, was not in the Commons for this afternoon's statement by Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland secretary, on the Wright enquiry. But interventions by nationalist and Unionist MPs show that, while McCrea's joint appearance with Wright was a woeful moment in the history of the DUP, political leaders did need to ask searching questions about the killing of Wright.

David Simpson, DUP MP for Upper Bann who represents the Wright family, highlighted the most important issue at the heart of the enquiry: he was killed while in the care of the state. Paying tribute to David Wright, the father of the murdered terrorist who has campaigned for an investigation, Simpson said:

No matter what his son was in for he was the responsibility of Her Majesty's Government and the Prison Service.

Billy Wright, the former leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, was shot dead by Republican gunmen in the Maze Prison in 1997. The £30m inquiry into Wright's death is expected to be highly critical of security around the jail